Sunday
March 31
Resurrection Family
By Marsh Chapel
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On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen.
Ponder this resurrection family, reaching from Mary to you, from Mary’s heart in the garden, to yours in the pew.
Your resurrection family is a heart-to-heart hearth, an I and Thou fellowship. We know Jesus now through his cousins become ours by faith. Resurrection is, if nothing else, relational, personal, familiar.
Mary in the garden, John 20, shows us so. You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart. Known by name. Through historical mist, through mysterious tradition, through numinous utterance, through biblical legend, through the possibility of impossibility, through the impenetrable imponderable, given to the least, Mary. Mary: wayward, female, alone, poor, powerless… loving…Mary Magdalene, come to the garden alone.
From Mary to the 12, from the 12 to the 500, from the 500 to the least of the apostles, from Paul to Rome and the church and the gentiles and me and you and even all the mere Methodists fleeing from the wrath to come.
From Mary to Marilynne Robinson, to Raymond Brown, to Ernest Fremont Tittle, to your mother, to Nancy Marsh Hartmann, to Marcel Proust to Charles Webb to you. My spiritual nourishment comes from reading, from faithful stories of struggle from our laity, and from worship, all of it, every smidgin of it—organ, hymn, choir, anthem, reading, sermon, prayer, sacrament all. It’s all I need. It’s all we need,
Charles Webb, who reshaped and reframed our second hymn, was the longtime organist at the Bloomington Indiana First UMC, and Professor at the School of Music at IU. An editor of our hymnal, he worked to improve the musical harmonies, and the musical cadences of the revival tradition hymns, a fairly large piece of work as the frequency of his name in the hymnal attests. I met him, once, when preaching in Bloomington. In his nineties now, he enjoys visits from his former pastor and our dear friend, and sometime summer preacher, Dr. Philip Amerson. We mortals face loss, misfortune, disaster, death. But we also see the glow that comes, say, in the nineties, when one’s hour in the sun is coming to an end. We also hear the power of the spoken word, in conversation, in State of the Union, in Sunday sermon. And we also recall William James, My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen.
Hear Marilynne Robinson, our guest at BU last year, and perhaps again next year: One Easter I went with my grandfather to a small Presbyterian church in northern Idaho where I heard a sermon on the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the resurrection…I was a young child… yet I remember that sermon…I can imagine myself that primal Easter, restive at my grandfather’s elbow, pushing my nickels and dimes of collection money into the tips of my gloves…memorably forbidden to remove my hat…It seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him…I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention all around me…and I thought everyone else must also be aware of it…Only in church did I hear experience like mine acknowledged, in all those strange narratives, read and expounded… What should we call the presiding intelligence that orchestrates the decision to speak as a moment requires? What governs the inflections that make any utterance unmistakably the words of one speaker in this whole language-saturated world? 120 (Our) theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God …heaven’s essence…is that it is inconceivable in the world’s terms, another order of experience…Amen (the preacher) said, having blessed my life with a lovely thing to ponder… (Death of Adam 221-229)
On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen.
I washed up on the shores of Union Theological Seminary in 1976, clumsily paying the cabbie double what I owed for the short ride from Grand Central to Grant’s Tomb, and, in retrospect, largely clueless about what was around me and before me. I had been raised in a Methodist parsonage, attended MYF Sunday by Sunday, worked three summers running a waterfront at a Methodist Camp (no drownings of record), and been graduated from Ohio Wesleyan, a small Methodist college for small Methodists. Yet I knew very little about the Bible. In short order the strange world of the Bible, and its mystery, its complexity, its strange, strange, strangeness captivated me, mesmerized and embraced me.
My advisor, a rumpled world famous Roman Catholic Biblical Theologian, from whom we have heard this Lent, invited me to meet with him, and proceeded over three years to guide, teach, and encourage me, far beyond any evidence I could give at the time of the value of his investment in time, forgiveness and attention. He daily wore a worn black suit and clerical collar. On our first meeting, at the end he said, ‘Mr. Hill, Dr Cyril Richardson is teaching this fall a course on the Early Christian Writers. He is excellent. Normally his course is reserved for second year students. But if you can somehow get a seat in the course, take it. I just don’t know how long we will have him here at Union. He spent last year at home in England.’ Brown was so right. It was an outstanding course, taught with high excellence, under the booming British stentorian voice of the world’s preeminent Patristics scholar. ‘Today we shall consider St. Athanasius, who makes Paul Tillich look like a pup, a rain-soaked puppy’. He had a love-hate relationship with my beloved Tillich. The course had 12 lectures. Richardson gave 10. Between 10 and 12, he died. At his funeral, a memorial Richardson himself had composed for a friend was read: Richardson said most of us do not fear death, but fear the death of our loved ones and death of our dreams. What a priceless resurrection gift, fifty years ago, to study under him, thanks to a member of the resurrection family, to my advisor, Raymond Brown.
Brown was glad enough to see my enthrallment with the Bible. But a year or so later, he looked through the piles of courses taken, and in plan, mostly Bible. He said, ‘Mr. Hill. You are going into pastoral ministry, are you not?’ ‘Well, yes’, I said, ‘I mean I think so I hope so, if they will have me’. ‘Well’ Brown said, ‘I am glad for all these Biblical courses you are taking, including those with me, but don’t you think you might want to take a course in Psychology and Religion? You are going to be a pastor, are you not? Ann Ulanov teaches some good courses in this area.’ So, well, I did. And it was hard, hard for me, psychology and religion. Not the content, but the, the, well, the depth. It was bracing. And good and right. What a priceless resurrection gift, fifty years ago, to study under her, thanks to my advisor, Raymond Brown.
At noon or so, I would cross Broadway to Teachers’ College (think John Dewey), to swim in their reasonably adequate pool. Coming out I often crossed paths with Dr. Brown, who celebrated the noon mass at Corpus Christi church on 121st street. You remember that Thomas Merton a generation earlier had an apocalyptic conversion experience it that same little church. There was Fr. Brown at 1pm, in the same rumpled black suit and collar, carrying a brief case back across the street to his seminary office. He taught on the west side of Broadway, and he preached on the east side of Broadway. Week by week. As a Methodist I should have known, but didn’t at that time, the incarnation Brown gave to Mr. Wesley’s beautiful hymn, the music under the words, and the words under the words, of our Boston University motto about learning, virtue and piety: Unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combine, truth and love (for all to see). What a priceless resurrection gift, fifty years ago, to study under my advisor, Raymond Brown.
On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen.
I have never seen or met Jesus. I never heard him speak, nor embraced or was embraced by him in person. I know him through the resurrection family. I know his resurrection through the family cluster and family systems of those who did know him, unto and through the cross and resurrection. Mary is preeminent.
In the same vein, I never did meet Ernest Fremont Tittle. I never heard him preach, nor in his lifetime ever attended his Evanston First UMC, the largest in our denomination at the time of his death in 1960. I read about him, but never greeted him. But I know him, keenly through the company of his lineage, his part of the resurrection family. I preached once in his venerable pulpit in 2010…including to the Garrett class of 1950, whom I embarrassingly and mistakenly, though not without some reason, greeted as the class of 1850!
Like my namesake Allan Knight Chalmers, and unlike me, Tittle was an outspoken pacifist through the whole second world war, from the highest of pulpits inthe mid-west. Fearless. For three decades he preached to Chicago, to the country and to the world. On Sunday evenings he gathered a steady fellowship of graduate students for dinner, to talk about faith and life, death and resurrection. I never saw him, never shook his hand, never viewed his youth or age. I was not present at his death. But his life was and is alive to me. Alive through the family of the resurrection, through those who as young adults worshipped with him and dined with him and prayed with him. They had everything in common. They were distinctively vital, active, liberal Christian Methodists. I give you Dr. Robert V. Smith, chaplain at Colgate, a Garrett graduate, and protégé of Tittle, whose example from Hamilton NY kept alive for me and many others the importance of university preaching, campus ministry, and theological education. His growling voice enunciated resurrection in the spirit of Tittle. For he had enjoyed Sunday dinners with Tittle. Smith worshipped here at Marsh Chapel some years ago. I give you Professor Roland Wolseley, Professor of African American Journalism at Syracuse University, a beloved faithful liberal pacifist, lay leader and parishioner in our Syracuse NY Erwin UMC. His editorial ear and kindness evoked kindness in the spirit of Tittle. He had Sunday dinners with Tittle. I give you Ruth Lippitt, the leading heart and mind in our Rochester Asbury First UMC, who stood up and stood out and stood for faith and hope and love. She and her husband David met at Sunday dinner with Tittle, and her unwavering courage evoked resurrection in the shadow of Tittle. I give you Dr. Christopher Evans, of Boston University, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Tittle, during his work at Garrett, and whose steady example in learning, virtue and piety reclaim by familial resurrection the daily example of Tittle. Hamilton, Syracuse, Rochester, Boston. These did not know each other, never met, but with so many others share a common familial resemblance, a family resurrection.
On Easter we receive and are received by a new resurrection family, the family of Jesus, crucified and risen! Sursum Corda! Lift up your hearts!
If we believe that life has meaning and purpose
And we do
If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us
And we do
If we believe that divine love lasts
And we do
If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure
And we do
If we believe that God so loved the world to give God’s only Son
And we do
If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity
And we do
If we believe that all God’s children are precious in God’s sight
And we do
If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe
And we do
If we believe that God has loved us personally
And we do
If we believe in God
And we do
Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death
And we do
Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death
And we do
Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection
And we do
Then we shall trust the faith of Christ, relying on faith alone
And we do
Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality
And we do
Then we shall trust that just deeds, merciful words are never in vain
And we do
Then we shall trust the Giver of Life to give eternal life
And we do
Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally
And we do
Then we shall trust that we shall rest protected in God’s embrace
And we do
Then we shall trust in God
And we do.
The Lord is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
